Target person identification and following based on omnidirectional camera and LRF sensor fusion from a moving robot

In this paper, we introduce an approach to identify and follow a target person for a service robot application. The robot is equipped with LRF and omnidirectional camera. Our approach is based on multisensor fusion in which a person is identified using the panoramic image and tracked using the Laser Range Finder (LRF). A target person selection is implemented to improve the identification when multiple candidates are detected. Our approach is successfully implemented on a mobile robot. A simplified target person following behavior is implemented to focus on the proposed method's efficiency. Several experiments are conducted and showed the effectiveness of our approach to identify and follow human in indoor environments.